There are known various apparatus for aligning proximal edges of two or more metallic materials to be connected by welding along their proximal edges. In a wide variety of manufacturing and metal processing applications, it is often desirable or necessary to join together tubes, bars, sheets or strips of metals such as aluminum or steel or their alloys by welding along a contiguous edge. Such joining can be accomplished by conventional welding equipment such as used in butt, or arc welding using electron beam, high energy lasers, plasma or other welding devices.
The quality of the seam-welding joined sheets is influenced to a great extent by the type of equipment used in the welding operations including the edge alignment devices, and clamps used to hold the joined sheets together. It should be noted that the sheets (or bars, or tubes, etc.) to be joined need not be made of identical materials, and often are not.
When preparing a frame or other item for welding, rigid steel plates are required to correctly align and position the pieces to be welded together. These
When preparing a frame or other item for welding, rigid steel plates are required to correctly align and position the pieces to be welded together. These plates must then be clamped by hand, one by one. This requires several clamps for each locating plate. A typical prior art clamp and alignment comprises clamps of conventional locking pliers having opposing jaw member to apply a clamping force on an alignment plate that fits over of this area to be welded. These clamping pliers usually have adjusting means at their lower portion to adjust the force or clamping action needed on the alignment plate.
Thus, in some prior art devices an alignment plate is needed to align the two items or members to be welded, and two plier-like clamps need to fit into these alignment plates. Set up and disassembly of all these required items are time consuming, awkward and, in addition, inefficient and difficult to use.
Welding a metallic frame or members requires that each frame member be held in a critical alignment position to ensure a precise and accurate weld. In the past, frame members were held in place by a multitude of these prior art pliers-like/welding clamps. These clamps required forceful gripping and awkward posturing for application and releasing of the clamps. The tedious repetitiveness of clamping would become apparent toward the end of the shift as operator fatigue would often set in. The present invention provides a set of individual clamping fixtures that easily slide into position and maintain the critical alignment positioning of the frame members. The simple, yet effective, configuration of this invention in use replaced 12 of 36 prior art clamps, and helped to minimize any opportunity for repetitive motion injury.